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Crime-solving distinguished by mercy

Reviewed by Peter Craven

Calm reality: The protagonist's sleuthing is made to glow by the author's familiarity with Venice. Photo: Alamy

CRIME FICTION By Its Cover Donna Leon Heinemann, $29.99

Donna Leon is one of the more unusual and satisfying writers of crime fiction in the current pantheon. Her detective Commissario Brunetti investigates his crimes in the environs of that ravishing theme park of the mind (and the actual world) Venice, but Leon doesn't take a bath in the city of Shylock and Casanova. Rather, she simply takes it for granted, so that La Fenice and San Marco and Florian's simply become the emblems of a small town we happen to have heard of or have been through, on a smaller, if more history-riven scale, the way a Scandinavian who once visited Melbourne might recall the MCG or the Shrine when she reads Shane Maloney.

Leon herself is one of those Italianate Americans who populate the novels of Henry James (her scholarly love), and the fact that she knows Venice like the back of her hand makes Brunetti's sleuthing glow in the mind like pale blue waters seen in winter light from the edge of a gondola or a motoscafo. Brunetti is exceptional among detectives. He's a thoughtful, not just brilliant, man and his pensiveness is devoted to a lot more than getting his man or madam. Not since Simenon's Maigret have we seen a detective so devoted to the reality and complexity of everyday life, though in his doodling, meditative Italian way, Brunetti is a lot less vengeful and steely than Maigret. Indeed as often as not he works out whodunit and decides to let him go or Leon lets the resolution trail off.

By Its Cover by Donna Leon.

What these books have to an exceptional degree is that nearly bemused quality of mercy which can seem so characteristic of the Italian form of kindness, like the trace element of a Catholicism that ran deeper and burned warmer than the Northern and Celtic varieties of puritan Christianity.

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Brunetti is hyperconscious of the world as a vale of tears, or at any rate of complications that have a human cost and of human faces as more important than the mask of justice, forensically considered. At the same time he's nothing like a saint in the Father Brown mould, or a disguised seer as Miss Marple.

He's just a good man understated, shuffling through the illusions that add to his decency and his capacity to see the world coolly and compassionately. By Its Cover is all about pinching books of a rare and marvellous variety from the great Biblioteca of the famous waterpool.

There's an ex-priest who's nicknamed Tertullian because he sits reading the Church Fathers over and over. There's talk of a guy who once punched him up and there's an up-against-it attendant in the library and a stylish dottoressa who runs it in cool splendour.

And, yes, because this is Leon there is a Sicilian lady, a contessa of still muted magnificence who owns a few books and moves in the same circles as Brunetti's in-laws. His wife Paola - who in counter-intuitive fashion provides some of the most dramatic moments in the Brunetti books - has a count for a father and a mother who is a contessa, with both of them exhibiting manners that make us feel like shrieking yobs. Well, so do a lot of other characters in the book, so do a lot of Italians.

No wonder Shane Maloney dreams of killing off Murray Whelan, saying death to the ALP and just settling in Venice. In Donna Leon's Brunetti books, that dream mutates into a very credible, calm reality.